


Benedicta

by ChristianExodia



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 11:16:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20723324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChristianExodia/pseuds/ChristianExodia
Summary: It's a short story that I wrote. It's just a draft of sorts; I wanted to post it and edit it over time to see how it grows and evolves. It's originally a class assignment but I want to make it into something else, maybe.





	Benedicta

Because of all the time she had been alive, she wanted little more than to die. She felt as if she had been on the soil for far too long, getting to see more of the human existence than one ever had the purpose to. The experiences that she had been through throughout the years greatly diminished her will to live and changed her from a maiden that charmed the hearts of men in her local village to one of a disillusioned madame, cursed to walk the earth without end. Watching star-crossed lovers wither away into the sand; children slowly age until they either pass far too young or they follow their fathers; watching the towns she inhabited rise and fall, walking silently through battle and plague as everyone around her was stricken and killed. Yet, she persisted. For all the stabs in the back, the pain of watching the wild eyes of those doomed to pass, the violence of sicknesses that laid out certain death for all around her… she carried on. Even as the memories of their existence faded into oblivion, she knew she had to carry the fragments that remained. For her. The one rag doll that tethers her to this plane of existence, one of the only things she can remember anything about.

The memories of a passionate youth, long since forgotten, were idyllic and without a care. Despite being a peasant girl, she could note some pleasures in her life. The people in her village; her family; the farm that she helped tend to, all of them kept a sort of strong vigor. She remembered all her brothers and sisters and how she took care of all of them. Being the oldest of them, she knew that her parents were planning to set her up for marriage eventually. Having another set of hands around the farm would help, especially in caring for her young sister. The little girl was only three, too young to know what was going on around her but old enough to be rapidly learning all about the world. She was a delight to the whole village, which was their whole world back in those days. She carried a small rag doll, one that was passed from child to child, passed from child to child in the generation. The maiden had herself toted around the doll as she toddled around years ago, causing one of the many rips and tears that still characterized the toy as it was cradled in her arms today. She had once had dreams of marrying, having a family. Those were now but long distant memories left in the passing carriages that she had seen on the other side of the road.

Her plans changed with the passing plague. People were dying in the streets; the horrors of the catastrophe crippled her village and ravaged everyone she knew. She watched her family pass, one by one. She knew she had to keep the little girl from trying to wake them up; despite everything, the little girl did not succumb to the illness like everyone else. The poor toddler did not understand death; she would after this. The woman needed to make sure she survived, even if Benedicta may not. A toddler left alone would quickly be decimated by the elements; as the woman felt herself growing sick, she steeled her will to not let herself fall. The little girl needed someone to hold her hand and guide her in this world. She could not let herself be diminished by the world around her.  


“Is Mommy asleep?” Her sister asked her one day as she was pulling the cover over the corpses that, when they breathed, were their parents.

“Yes,” She replied. “She’s going to take a long nap and talk to God.”

She had to tell her sister that each time as each of their other siblings slowly died. The maiden herself got sick, but it was as if God had shone on her. The two of them, alone, remained in the house, in the village. She had seen beaked doctors try in vain to perform holy rituals before they, too, succumbed to the horrible malady. Barely able to stand as she coughed up blood and felt as if death had its scythe up to her neck, Elizabeth had to bury the rest of the family. One evening, as she lay in bed, she found herself visited by a vision. Angels swirled around her head, but she wasn’t sure their meaning. The vision was fuzzy; her memory of the moment fading like the sands of time. She could not remember for the life of her what the memory was, nor how she felt about those moments. It was too far away now. She could only vaguely cite God smiling on her. However, it was the beginning of the end for her sister.

The next morning, the little girl took ill. The maiden toiled day and night to care for the little girl. She couldn’t let her go the way of the others. Everything was so clear. It was as if for every bit that she got better; her sister would get worse. She became the conduit of the maiden’s illness, and the maiden knew the sister wouldn’t get better. Over the next few days, the maiden did her best to assure that the sister was as comfortable as she could be.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to go talk to god.” The sister said one morning as the maiden wept. “I’ll be back soon.” The girl looked up, a single tear rolling down her cheek in a psychotic bliss. Within the minute, her shining blue eyes went pale. The maiden’s eyes, too, went pale.

The death of her sister left the maiden a changed woman. She soon realized that she would not fade from the world of the living. Unaging, unwavering, she covered the tiny body and took on what she saw as her given duty. Instead of burying her, she set the body—and the house—alight. She carried the cross with her, but, to the untrained eye, the maiden was just a girl carrying a doll and a story to tell. She recognized the point of carrying stories with her, recording history as best as she could. Traveling for days on end, by herself, she found herself at a monastery and gave herself to the faith to chronicle the word of God and, sincerely, to write the stories of her life. Stories warped and twisted in her mind such that they became facsimiles of their former selves.

She found herself, over many long years, disillusioned by the faith. She watched generations of pious girls age into old women who, themselves, withered away. The maiden was said to be blessed by God; the doll she carried, the one true possession that she carried as she died to the world, carried the name she would take in the convent: Benedicta. She lived simply, working to give last rites to those in need, those who did not have the money to afford a priest. She lived on battlefields for long periods; despite the danger, she always came out unscathed. Her clothing may have been tattered, but her body—and her message and what she represented to the soldiers—was always untouched. The last words of a scared boy soldier that she met on her journey became the rallying cries that won long sieges, the folk tales of her village became scattered and forgotten in her mind.

In her memory, Benedicta carried the rag doll around. The legend spread over time of a woman, that soon became seen like a spirit, there to whisk the fallen soldier to the afterlife. Her legend spread, but she herself became forgotten. She lost her name; lost who she was; and lost the last remnants of the world she had known in her youth. She was Benedicta, the lady of the battlefield. To her, these dying soldiers reminded her of a loss that was too tough to bear. Depictions of her showed up in artwork that scattered around the land, much to her displeasure, which showed a flawless woman that led the spirits of the unlucky and forgotten into Providence. After she gave up the faith and set herself to writing the stories she had heard on her travels, the story continued. She had practically been written into the urban legends of the time as a woman of the faith; she even chronicled herself into a tale that has been credited to a man in the town where she lived. Her left hand still ached, hundreds of years later, from the violent smacks it had received when she tried to use her better side to write with while she was learning. The library of her work became numerous, and she finally found it fit to settle in one place. The mendicant lifestyle no longer followed, her possessions became numerous as she found ways to find income and write more books.

Still, unshackled by faith and unshackled by the trappings of a familial conviction, she grew lonely. This task was something that she had to do alone, and she knew the pains of becoming attached again. It was not something she wanted to tolerate; the wounds of everyone who had passed before her weighed heavy on her mind. Looking into the eyes of someone who knows that their time is up, to lie that they will be alright or to say that God will lead them to Providence for their sacrifice… it sickened her every time she had to bring it up in her works or she had to bear the memories of the experience.

Printing, to her, was a crucial invention: it would make sure that the stories of the age would survive into perpetuity. She saw the world slowly pass by around her, people building statues to kings that would surely crumble in their lifetime. Each moment felt like an eternity; the inability to die that she was once blessed with was morphing, in her mind, into a curse. Her memories began to slip away slowly. She desperately wrote down everything she knew and repeated it to herself until it became unreadable. She pleaded for someone to read her works and to put them to print for perpetuity, but she was scoffed at and rebuked every time.

The townsfolk just talked of the woman who lived on her own. She was but a simple harbinger of bad omens, a mad-woman who brought evil wherever she went, Benedicta heard from them as she passed by. She made a meager living as a scribe in her town before the press took away the need for her. She had many scripts that lined her halls but, as the years passed, she forgot what they truly read. At first, it was one or two words that she stopped being able to recognize. So, she wrote down words; bit by bit, madly trying to remember all that she could. But, over time, she even began to lose the capability to understand the texts that helped decipher other texts, which themselves grew to be foreign codices that were locked away in some unintelligible cipher. Benedicta languished in agony for years, desperately trying to reclaim everything that she had once written down. Text after text, attempting to recollect words to unlock other words to unlock older texts that she herself had written.

As years passed even further into centuries, the maiden began to feel locked in her own mind. Unable to die, but unable to live, she found herself alone. No longer able to understand others around her or to hold memories for any amount of time, she began to lose what little she was able to retain. Her library was found one day by some lucky professor, some lucky passer-by, and it made her a celebrity. The books contained centuries of memory written in progressive elements of her old language as it evolved to modern. It had dictionaries; vivid depictions of battles lost to time; words lost to time and a chronicle of her existence. She had lived nearly six hundred years by that time, the scholar found, a number verified by the townspeople. Even the most elderly townsperson could recollect a moment that their elders told them a story about the woman on the top of the hill, outside the town, who came by every month with new script to be printed, only to each time be turned away.

As she became a celebrity, people whom she forgot tormented her became her best friends. Each day they met her again, tolerating the maiden’s demands for their name and their apologies for her memory. She was talked to by scholars who were saddened to figure out she had nothing more to give. Still, regardless, her advanced age and immortality made her a curious figure in the eyes of doctors and her work gave her the respect of historians. They found the scars of plague on her skin and the remnants of the diseases of the ages in her blood. They showed her around the world as the oldest person to ever live; they championed her works of history as helping piece together the ages in a way that none had ever seen prior. The next day, however, she’d wake up, scared, in some new place she could not remember coming to.  _ Where was the house? Where am I? Who are these people?  _ This repeated in her head constantly. Despite having the looks of a very young, beautiful woman, her hair was tousled; her eyes were dull yet wild; and her face was becoming wrinkled from the constant stress. Soon, even those concerns escaped her mind and only one returned when she gave any attention to her mental processes:  _ I want to die. _

Alone amongst the fog of memories that she maintained normally was a sole fragment, something that she could quite never see herself giving up. She found herself fixated on one singular item: the rag doll that her sister had toted hundreds of years ago. Even as everything else left her mind, the rag doll and what it meant to her remained. She had made little notes in her stories and histories to wax poetic about her sister, but now her mind could only tether onto that little old rag doll. By now, she needed assistance from anyone who could provide it. She was frail and young, undying but unliving.

One day, a single historian came to her house. He had messaged her; she accepted. Few ever came to her house nowadays; she seemed to have given anything that she could at this point. Any company would be welcomed, even if she reacted in shock when he burst into her room. Only the note left by her bed, combined with the calendar full of crossed-off marks by her bed that reminded her what day it was, told her that he was coming. He wanted to know all she had to give about the past. She could see the desperation in his eyes. She wouldn’t remember it the next day.

Her room, provided to her for as long as she lived by the state that had come to annex the land she lived on, was a single bed surrounded by shelves upon shelves of copies of her works. The originals were whisked here and there and everywhere, but she couldn’t remember the difference between the two. She had the books she had written, but she couldn’t remember they were hers. 

“What do you remember?” He asked her rapidly, trying to coax an answer. She could tell that he was desperate for something, anything, that would give him a lead on how to move forward.

“Nothing. I remember nothing.” She clutched the rag doll tight. He wasn’t going to get an answer anyway, even if she had anything to give. He was too rash, too young.

“How can you remember nothing? You’ve lived for hundreds of years. You have to know something!” His voice was full of outrage. Clearly, he was looking for some answer from her. It was a bit of humor for her, however, and she showed by laughing like a young schoolgirl. Her eyes almost wooden, her smile thin, it was as if a marionette was being controlled by someone behind the curtain that spanned the expanse of her bed frame.

“Let’s play a game.” She nestled the rag doll, sewed in hundreds of places by many hands, in her embrace. “Find something I do remember.”

The historian gave her a confused look and began rattling off different dates and battles and stories. She had wandered those battlefields apparently, but she had no recollection. She only knew, in the moment, that she was there, and he was here, and that one thing sat in-between their presence.

“I believe you are looking too far away from where we are, good sir,” She croaked out, her smile widening as he struggled profusely to find any source of memory when it sat right in front of him.

“What do you mean? I have everything I need to see right here!” He motioned to the expanse of books that surrounded her bed. “You must remember something from the books!”

“Do they reference the rag doll in any way?” She asked simply.

The historian went silent. “Is that… truly all you remember, Miss Elizabeth? That rag doll that shows up so often in your work?”

“Yes.” She was truthful. Even if she didn’t remember what she wrote, she remembered how important the ragdoll was to her life.

“You only remember the rag doll? Do you remember anything else?”

“Only the rag doll and its story, and I fear not for much longer.” Elizabeth could feel the memory fading from her mind. “I will tell you… if you want anything from me, this is all you’re going to get. There really is nothing else to give.”

The historian glanced at her. Surrounded by all the wonderful works that she had written, she had but one memory: Of her sister. Only seldom did she ever think to write of her; she knew that, in the past, she was too zealous to think that the memory of her sister should ever be written down. But, now… was not the time to hide anything. Now was the time to give up everything she could; she could not bear to lose this last secret to the world. She could die, for all she cared. She wanted to, but the memory of her sister couldn’t afford to go with her. Even if she was finally able to die, she wanted those memories to live on as a reminder of why she wrote.

“Before this memory goes… write it quickly.” She detailed the short twelve-year life of her beautiful sister, the rag doll and what remnants she had of its story… everything she had left to give from the past. The historian listened on, writing down scribbles that she could no longer read. She didn’t know how. Soon, she may forget writing’s existence. She might forget anything that would tether her to this accursed world. Soon, she might even see her sister. Maybe. If she was able to remember who she was. She asked him to come back tomorrow and to tell her again.

The next day, he did come back. She didn’t remember that he would, of course; he had left a note, but she didn’t know it was there. She forgot to look for it; even still, she was forgetting how to read. Still, she was happy. She knew, even if she didn’t quite know why, that she had finally been able to say everything that she needed to. Maybe God would finally be pleased with her. She could just go to sleep now, hoping, just like every other day that the Lord would take her away and she could be done. Just like every day, she would forget the promise. Just like every day, she would start again without a care in the world and without an understanding of what’s happening and end with that same promise.


End file.
